Читать книгу The Byzantine Achievement - Robert Byron - Страница 6

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From sifting the numerous implications of meaning attaching to the word "civilization," there emerges a definition, which presumes it to consist in the vitality of three elements in man's corporate mode of living. These are: the Stable; the Transcendental; and the Cultural. Vitality in each simultaneously is seldom found, save in large cities whence they radiate their combined influence throughout their city's dominion. And the rarity of even this coincidence constitutes the rarity of civilizations. Failure in the vitality of any one of them denotes a lapse from true civilization to conditions of life comparable with those of fifteenth century Italy or the present Middle West of the United States.

First essential to the definition of civilization is the stable element, the universal confidence in the social organism to maintain itself and its government, and to modify itself to external and internal necessity. This confidence, when it exists, pervades people unconsciously. Security of property, the standards of living, the countless services of local government—all go for granted without thought or investigation, like the sun and the stars, symbolized in those outward features, dinner jackets, bathrooms and asphalt roads, which evoke the awe and envy of less advanced peoples.

Second is that composite element in human activity, the quest of transcendental values, and their collateral ethics. To every race, in infancy and succeeding childhoods, is vouchsafed the concept of a God. This, ultimately, may lose identity in that of a gentleman. But underneath social demeanor, there remains to man his soul proper, his own greatness, his unquiet spirit seeking cosmic direction, ever striving to soar above the mental gravities of earth. It is contended that civilizations such as that upon which we are entering, retard the divine quest in humanity by the very security with which they encushion it against the fundamental workings between man and earth, man and man, man and God. But it remains to be seen whether those relationships do not, as the scientific revolution approaches its climax, attain a depth and precision of definition hitherto undreamed. And the soul, mathematically propelled, may redouble the exploration of its affinity in space, dictating, with historical experience as its partner, successive codes and morals for the earth.

Third and final element in civilization is the cultural, product of the scientific and artistic impulse generated by a corporate intellectual activity. It is in this province that the inspired individual souls of an age become accessible to the majority, whose diversity of intelligence and occupation will not permit their investigation of the mysteries with which they arc communicant, but not, beyond the one-sided peephole of religion, conversant.

The stable, the transcendental, the cultural: genii of civilization. Each has existed without the others. Hellas had Culture, Judah a Soul, Renaissance Europe both. The United States of America now enjoy the blessings of Stability. But it is the fusion of the three that constitutes a civilization, the vitality of which will vary inversely with the deficiency in any one of them. We in Europe, sponsors of a civilization which posterity will term the most momentous phenomenon in history, are conscious of the necessity to hold the balance between them, if less certain of the ability. And it is at this point that the relevance of civilization's analysis in connection with the eastern Mediterranean becomes clear. Only once, during the whole history of our continent and all the peoples that have contributed to our present, has this balance been discovered; and once discovered maintained for nine centuries, to contend against the agony of dissolution for another two. This was behind the walls, and within the sphere, of Constantinople.

Thus, in considering the role of the Levant during the convulsions of the early twentieth century, it is to be remembered that not only may the population of the Aegean coasts contribute a larger share to the maintenance of our present vital civilization than is popularly supposed; but that it, Greek, alone of European races, has experienced such a phenomenon in the past. Culture it had. Out of the East rose a soul. From the 'West marched stability. The soul transformed the culture, the culture the soul. And the Byzantine civilization, the joyous life that once crowded on the Golden Horn and flourished in woods and gardens by the sweet waters of Asia, has left a heritage to the world and its imprint uneffaced upon the Levant. Its interest in the present derives partly from the state of its people today; and partly from its share in the formation of, and in its affinity with, its universal successor of the West.

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In considering the stability of the social edifice, the affinity between Western and Byzantine civilization is both external and internal.

In the external relations of its political units, the chief hope of the modern world lies in the elimination of the armed and insular state, and the aggressive racial consciousness of its inhabitants. It was this spirit, though confined within the smaller units of municipalities, which reduced ancient Greece to the point of extinction. Hellenic culture, art, science, literature and philosophy, were saved only through the medium of the Roman Empire; and at long last through the creation, culminating in the transference of the capital to Constantinople, of an international spirit that was, in fact, an all-pervasive Hellenism. More influential, still, in this process of transcending racial barriers, was Christianity, newly adopted as the state religion. For it was in this process that lay the strength and cohesion of the Byzantine Empire. The world of the present day offers a comparison almost exactly similar. The European countries correspond to the city-states of Greece; the range of Anglo-Saxon institutions to that of Roman; Europeanism to Hellenism; and the intellectual effect of the scientific revolution to Christianity. It may be argued that, far from creating an international spirit, the British Empire has done no more than propagate an evil nationalism. During the last half-century, the charge may hold good. But by its work of Europeanization, of which, indeed, it is only the foremost exponent, it has laid a common ground on which the peoples of the world may find the basis of international concord. This also, on a lesser territorial scale, did Constantinople accomplish. Within her walls mingled all the races of Eurasia, and all their products, commercial, cultural, philosophical. And even now, after all her centuries of misfortune, the same races jostle in Constantinople and the ghost of the old cosmopolitan ideal pervades the city. For the Greeks she has no name: she is "[Greek characters]—the capital." And her present Greek inhabitants, should the traveler ask their nationality, are still "[Greek characters]—Romans" To them, a precarious 400,000, has the Byzantine identity descended.

It is widely believed that the Anglo-Saxon political ideal, lately swallowed undigested by the world, affords the greatest promise to any people of internal strength. In so far as generalization is possible, this ideal may be termed a perpetual seeking to readjust the equilibrium which enables the state to care for the interests of the individual without prejudice to its own. Failure to maintain this equilibrium must result either in disruption, as in the case of the Roman Empire, or in the forging of hard, aggressive political units, such as Europe has endured ever since. In the light of this ideal, the internal structure of the Byzantine state bears, if not a physiognomic likeness, a singular affinity to that of ourselves: the same equilibrium, if by different means, is held; the difference in means arising from the fact that instead of, as with us, developing compactly as a manifestation of national life, this equilibrium was the result of two diverse and opposite forces. For the internal strength of the Byzantine Empire was attained by the imposition of a supremely practical machinery of government upon the most individualistic people on earth.

The previous chapter has attempted to analyze that satirical element in Greek character which must always ensure democracy wherever there are communities of Greeks, and has always prevented the arising of those aristocratic and priestly caste systems, which have only, during the last twenty years, ceased to be the inevitable outcome of the search for Stability in the older continents. The Byzantine state does not, it must be admitted, present at first sight a democratic complexion. But it may be borne in mind that the Greeks, while able to discern in all men the failings that make all men equal, are capable of an almost superstitious veneration for traditions and institutions. It was this faculty, already permeated, in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, with the deeper and more austere mysticism of the Aramean peoples, which enabled them to accept and consolidate the Eastern conception of sovereignty that beat like a strong man's heart for eleven centuries within the walls of Constantinople. The Emperor, ruling or fighting, was the viceregent of God; to God he was responsible. But he was also a man, and as such, bound by the laws of his other self's making. The support of the people was given not to his person, but his office, to his crown, his scepter, and the mystical procession of his days. In their eyes, the partition or even usurpation of his functions was justified by the subsequent success of the usurper. Further, the Emperor was in theory, and frequently in fact, chosen by election, by the Senate, the Army, and the People in the Hippodrome. Equally might this triple ratification be revoked. The balance between individualism and political efficiency in the Byzantine state was maintained by an Oriental autocracy, fettered by a Roman bureaucracy, and supported by a Greek democracy. And it may be doubted whether the Mediterranean peoples will ever evolve a better system of government. Contemporary events seem to show that it is only the non-political temperament of the Northern races, which can withstand the dissensions of parties and parliaments.

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Thus, in its relations both with subjects and tributaries, was the stability of the Empire based on principles such as our own. In the transcendental sphere the affinity is harder of definition. It may perhaps be expressed in the quality of discontent with the material aspect of things, which is common to both. In the mind of medieval West, man existed only in terms of theology, in his relation to God. Though the Byzantines were the parents of that mind, they themselves, in constant communion with the classics, never wholly lost sight of man's rational dignity. In the West, after the Renaissance and the Reformation, such was the reaction, that only the rational remained—to bring, ultimately, the scientific revolution. But it is science, in its revelation of the irrational, that has again revived for us the compromise enjoyed by the Byzantines. Certainly our determination of man has not reverted to the theological. But it recognizes and fosters man's aspirations to discover the Spirit and Reality of his world. What the Byzantine sought through Christ, we may through a mathematical rationalization of the intuitions. The goal is the same. Had Christianity remained as the Byzantines perfected it, and not been distorted by the common sense of the Latin peoples and the romantics of the Northern, it might have merged harmoniously with the present mode of thought. That now is not possible. But if the errant soul of the twentieth century is to gauge the extent of its predecessors' achievement, the ungrudging recognition of Christianity's service in rescuing man from the earthen fetters of classicism is essential. The Byzantines and all their works were consecrated to the dominion of soul over mind. We and ours too. But the mind was to them, and should be for us, the instrument of its own subordination. This precept Western Europe has never, hitherto, accepted.

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More plainly, however, than in the stable and transcendental elements of a civilization, it is in its culture that is reflected with greatest prospect of endurance for posterity, its character, and the personality of its people. And nowhere is the affinity between Constantinople and the early industrial era of the twentieth century more easily visible than in the provinces of art and architecture. Against the ponderous complacence of classicism, the stationed symmetry, the reasoned representation; against the whole implied negation of the beyond and the before; there rises in the two parallel ages a quest of movement and emotional expression, which bursts the confinement of capital and cornice, and spurns the suave contours of rotund boys and bolstered urns. This vigor derives in one case from Christianity, in the other from science, each the new force of its time, carrying Reason to the service of the irrational. Form and technique, moreover, both the Byzantine and the modern have sought, not locally, but universally, not from set canons of proportion and preconceived ideas of grace, but from the whole multitude of methods of artistic expression with which the scope of their influence has brought them in contact.

It is a far cry from the squat bulk of St. Sophia to the windows of a modern block of offices. Yet the breath of both carries the eye away to a suggestion of something beyond the material substances of brick and stone and the fashioning of human hands. In a classical building the vision of the beholder, moving up the pillars, is brought gradually to rest by the projecting encrustations of the capital, to be finally deflected to earth by the sharp edge of the cornice. In a Byzantine, though superficially many of the forms are inherited, the capital is expressly carved to carry the eye on upward, and there is no cornice. Inside and out, in all the buildings of the Empire, from the great domed mass of St. Sophia to the fortified monasteries of Athos, the hint of perpendicular activity persists. Only in Tibet, which shares with the latter the distinction of political theocracy in the twentieth century, is analogy forthcoming. The cardinal importance of the subordination of all external ornament to the passage of the eye is exemplified, for contemporaries, in the town hall at Stockholm or, on a lesser scale, in the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

From the East also arrived, in the train of Christianity, the art of interpreting form; which not only rendered Byzantines the most perfect artificers of pattern that have ever been; but enabled them, in relief, mosaic and painting, to substitute an expressed insight into the symbolism of the object portrayed for the prevalent surface representation of the Hellenistic era. The apotheosis of this method was reached in the paintings of Domenicos Theotocopoulos, commonly known as El Greco. And by him, alone favored to carry the thousand-year-old artistic tradition of Constantinople to fruition, has been expressed more absolutely than by any other artist, that elusive constancy of things which the twentieth century has set itself to recapture. All art and all science seeks ultimately what cannot be attained. If Greco, the Byzantine, has reached further than his fellows, let the present age congratulate itself that, in contrast to its predecessors, it does at least hold the goal in sight.

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Thus, in terms of the three elements of civilization, is the Byzantine affinity with ourselves revealed. The sympathies of a new era, in which nationalism, dogmatism, and classicism have ceased to hold all the field, reveal a forgotten light in the past. But it is not merely that the light has lain hid in gentle obscurity, that the memory of the old Greek Empire had lapsed, after 1453, into beneficent oblivion. In the whole annals of the world's history there has survived the record of no civilization which has been subject to such conscious misinterpretation as the Byzantine. The gall of that jealous and illiberal culture, which fastened on Europe as the backwash of the Renaissance, has been loosed upon that which it cannot comprehend.

This attitude of prejudice in the Western mind dates originally from medieval times, product of that fortress of rational outlook, the Roman Church. In 1054, the papal legates laid their anathema on the altar of St. Sophia. Thenceforth, in the eyes of the West, the followers of the Orthodox Church were heretics who had disrupted the spiritual lordship of the Pope in Rome. Forty years later, in the guise of the first crusade, the Eastern Empire was invaded by the vast host of beggars, dotards, prostitutes, and children that had flocked to the call of Peter the Hermit. At their head rode the freebooting chivalry of Europe, to implant a retrograde feudalism and hostile Church in the ancient territories of the Byzantine dominion. Throughout the twelfth century the armies of Western Europe appeared and reappeared, ravaging where they trod. The cultured and civilized Greeks, contemptuous and resentful, remained aloof. And such cross-bedizened champions as survived the disasters of Asia Minor, jealous of the prosperous life of the Empire, returned to fill Western Europe with tales of the perfidy and treachery of the schismatics of Constantinople. "Those who were not for us were against us," was the cry. Thenceforth, an odium has attached to the Byzantines which has augmented rather than diminished with time.

With the close of the Middle Ages, intellectual progress was diverted to the channels prescribed by the classical model. While the lamps of Hellas glowed once more, and provincial Athens, conveniently inaccessible, assumed an unfamiliar eminence as the former nursery of human perfection, Greek civilization and its capital had disappeared from the horizon. But not for always. In 1734 the sluice gates were opened by Montesquieu's Causes de la Grandeur des Romains et leur Décadence. And in 1776 there appeared the first volume of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

As a master of historical technique, Gibbon is without equal. By means of his torrential style, his restrained impropriety, and the incomparable sarcasm of his attacks upon the bore of his own and others' adolescence, Christianity, he has made history an entertainment to more people than any single man. Simultaneously, he has achieved another superlative distinction. Accurate in every statement of his work, there has lived no individual writer responsible for a greater volume of inferential falsehood than he. Since his advent, successive generations have sincerely subscribed to his view that the most important civilization previously evolved in Europe was no more than a Decline and a Fall. Of all histories, that of Constantinople is least capable of biographical treatment. Following his method, there might be compiled with equal regard for fact and disdain of truth, a chronicle of the American continent from the sexual shortcomings of transatlantic presidents, fortified by an implicit belief in the veracity of the Hearst press.

The achievement, apart from the affinity with the present, of Byzantine civilization, may be summarized in two relations: to its people, and to us.

To its people, politically, the Empire stood, a valid organism for all but nine centuries; and a courageous organism still for two more. Not once during that time did the form of government change. Of the 88 occupants of the imperial throne, 66 ascended by regular procedure. And of the 22 usurpers, the majority followed one another over small periods of years, which comprised only temporary interludes in the peaceful working of the whole.

Spiritually, it is doubtful whether there has ever existed, over so long a period of time, so large a proportion of men and women, under one government, deeply and sincerely anxious to maintain communion with their God at all moments of their lives. Ethically, public opinion did not necessarily, as in Northern countries, ostracize those who did not conform to its standards.

Culturally Byzantine intellect evolved, in painting and mosaic, a technique of color and delineation, which envisaged the experiences of the soul as none has done before or since. An essential austerity developed, which a lavish profusion of splendid materials could never deflect; and which, combined with largeness of general conception, produced, in St. Sophia, one of the supreme pinnacles of architecture.

For ourselves, ushers of a universal civilization, the Empire also stood for 1123 years, a solitary bulwark against the peoples of Asia which threatened, if they broke through, to extinguish that civilization. How nearly, indeed, they might have succeeded was illustrated afterwards by the two sieges of Vienna and by the two centuries of warfare which stunted the development of central Europe and were the direct result of the disaster of 1453. While Western Europe was assimilating the negative, nomadic forces that broke upon the West Roman Empire, Constantinople was combating the positively destructive impetus unloosed by Mohammed in the seventh century. Throughout, she retained intact the great codifications of Roman law, to the revived study of which at Bologna in the eleventh century, the majority of European legal systems owe their existence.